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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Bush-Cheney began illegal NSA spying before 9/11

Bush and Cheney (photo: AP)

By Ralph Lopez, Digital Journal

15 July 13

ontradicting
a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless
domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records
indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at
least 7 months prior to 9/11.

The Bush administration bypassed the law requiring
such actions to be authorized by FISA court warrants, the body set up in
the Seventies to oversee Executive Branch spying powers after abuses by
Richard Nixon. Former QWest CEO John Nacchios said that at a meeting with the NSA on February 27, 2001,
he and other QWest officials declined to participate. AT&T,
Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to shunt customer communications
records to an NSA database.

"Nacchio suggested that the NSA
sought phone, Internet and other customer records from Qwest in early
2001. When he refused to hand over the information, the agency
retaliated by not granting lucrative contracts to the Denver-based
company, he claimed."

Other sources corroborate the former CEO's allegations, which were made in the course of his legal defense against insider trading charges. Both Slate.com and National Journal have published reports in which sources are quoted which support the former CEO's claims.

Speaking on "FOX News Sunday" this weekend in defense of the Obama administration's NSA PRISM program,
which has caused a national uproar over the sweeping intrusion by the
government into American citizens' emails, live chats, and other
electronic communications, Cheney said:

"Now, as everybody has been
associated with the program said if we had this before 9/11, when there
were two terrorists in San Diego, two hijackers, able to use that
program, that capability against the target, we might have been able to
prevent 9/11,"

However, the presence of such powers in the hands of
the present administration did not succeed in preventing the Boston
Marathon attacks, even though the suspects were already well-known to
the FBI, and one allegedly told law enforcement, while in the hospital,
that they were able to "download plans for pressure cooker bombs from the Internet.

In the same interview on "Fox news Sunday" Cheney called NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a "traitor."

In 2004, an AT&T technician filed a class action lawsuit
against AT&T for engaging in an illegal domestic-surveillance
program at the behest of the government. The Bush administration
accessed major routers owned by telecommunications companies, in cities
such as San Francisco, to divert traffic onto NSA mirror sites in order
to capture vast volumes of data.

The Bush-Cheney administration fought fiercely to pass
legislation which granted telecommunications companies immunity from
prosecution for violating Americans' Fourth Amendment rights under the
Constitution. The legislation was passed in 2008. UK Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that
the unprecedented "retroactive" immunity would also give the Bush
administration immunity as well, by preventing lawsuits from moving
forward into the discovery phase, where wrongdoing was likely to be
uncovered.

Nevertheless, political accountability activists
continue to press for action against the Bush, and now the Obama,
administrations for violations of the Constitution and settled law. On
April 19th of this year a California attorney, Inder Comar, filed two lawsuits
in the Northern District of California against George W. Bush, Richard
Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Paul
Wolfowitz for planning and waging a "war of aggression" against Iraq, in
violation of laws set down at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. A radio
interview of Comar can be heard on peace activist Cindy Sheehan's radio show HERE.

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